Saturday, August 28, 2021


 


TALES OF A TRAVELER

Geoffrey Crayon (Washington Irving). 1815-1882

A collection of tales in four parts, sorted by title, hence:  Strange Stories. by a Nervous Gentleman,  Buckthorne and his Friends,  The Italian Banditti, and The Money-Diggers.

The first group relates the experiences of the members of a hunting party, lolling about in their chairs, after dinner, in an old mansion in 19th C. England and telling each other ghost stories.  The oldest diner tells a story about an ancestor who spent the night in the tower of an old French manse and was awakened after midnight by a tall lady dressed all in white who warmed her hands at the fire and slowly drifted away.  According to the host the next morning she was the Duchess of Longueville.  During the reign of Louis 14th, she was a participant in the civil war of the Fronde, and was upset by the imprisonment of her husband the Duke and some of his friends.  Then another raconteur recites one about his old aunt who solved the mystery of groans in her bedroom emanating from a large picture of her husband, who had died shortly after their wedding.  An Irish Captain then honors the group with a description of his grandfather, a bold Dragoon.  Stuck overnight in Bruges, on his way to England, he spent the night in an ancient hostelry and observed some very strange behaviors as regards the furniture occupying the apartment.  Next, the unfortunate fate of a young German antiquarian who became entangled with the fate of a beautiful lady and her appointment with Madame la Guillotine.  The tales continue, and this section ends with a peroration concerning a young Italian student and his fatal attraction to Bianca, the daughter of a Genoese nobleman.

In Buckthorne and His Friends, we learn about the life and adventures of a literarily inclined member of the English upper classes.  Buckthorne loses his inheritance and survives by taking positions in a variety of enterprises.  He joined a traveling troupe, tried his hand as an essayist, and eventually wound up attending classses at Oxford University.  Later, failing in most of his endeavors, he returns to his native soil, only to find that his father has died, leaving his money and property to a local runagate.  Concerning this period in his life, he comments:  "I was at that age when a man knows least, and is most vain of his knowledge, and when he is extremely tenacious in defending his opinion upon subjects about which he knows nothing."

In The Italian Banditti, we learn a lot about the culture and behavior of Italian outlaws and how they survived during the early 1900's.  Stories about kidnapping, thievery and murder are related by one traveler after another as they spend the night in an inn in Terracina.  How a brave Englishman single-handedly rescues the wife of a fellow passenger through the judicious use of hot lead;  the fate of a young maiden whose father wouldn't pay her ransom; and how an artist used his skills to obtain release from a bandit captain.  The final tale describes a battle between the members of a stage coach and its military escort, and the desperate attempt by a gang of mountain-dwellers to loot and kidnap the travelers.

The Money-Diggers has to do with the early inhabitants and settlers of the Dutch enclave of the upper Hudson river.  In The Devil and Tom Walker, we learn the ultimate fate of a poor miser who acquires a large fortune as the result of taking a short cut through a swamp.  Later we visit the family of Wolfert Webber, the last in a long chain of cabbage growers who becomes enamored with the possibilities of "gold as found" and with the thought of hidden buried treasure.  A red-headed stranger, a violent storm and the secret activities of a mysterious stranger all lead to a rather peculiar, and modern, salvation for poor Wolfert and his family, after several years of searching, fruitlessly, for the ill-gotten gains of Captain Kidd.

Irving is just a delight to read.  His sentences flow like water, and impart a cozy confidence in the reader that a master story-teller is in charge.  He's not particularly deep, or profound, but he's very human in the best sense:  civil, cultured, knowledgeable, and, above all, friendly.  It's like talking to your best friend, or visiting your great-aunt who pushes chocolate cookies at you.  i'd recommend his work highly to anyone at all interested...

19 comments:

  1. These sound very enjoyable! I haven't read a lot of Irving, only Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle (I think? It's been too long). I'll have to look this up on Gutenberg...

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    1. that's where i found it... after downloading it i found out that i actually have a hard copy of it! it was a fun read...

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  2. I've enjoyed everything of Irving's that I've ever read. I agree with you about his writing "flowing." I had not heard of this book but I am going to look it up. Thanks for the review.

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    1. my pleasure! i'd highly recommend his two histories of "how the west was won", also... one was "Astoria" and the other one "Captain Bonneville"...

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  3. At first I thought, who is Geoffrey Crayon, I must find this book. Then I realized it was Washington Irving, one of my favorites and since I own all his writing, I know I have these stories somewhere. Now I'm going to look them up. I especially love ghost stories.

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    1. i hope you enjoy them as much as i did, Sharon!

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  4. I haven't read these either, though I did know about them. They sound like fun! (And Washington Irving is generally pretty great.)

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    1. i think so, also... i remember mentioning the western exploration books he wrote; they held my interest well and were exemplars of his excellent prose style, i thought...

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  5. Your last paragraph really resonates with me. The very best books make you feel that way, and I love it. I also always feel a bit sad when the book ends, like the conversation is over for now and a good friends has gone away.

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    1. thankfully, there are quite a few Irvings to enjoy... i'm constantly reminded about how many genres there are in the literary universe; not all worth investigating, maybe, but nobody can cover them all, and there are always surprises, lol...

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    2. I have not read The Legend of Sleepy Hollow in quite some time and think I need to revisit it. His works are so much more broad than that, but it was a favorite of mine.

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    3. i haven't read it in a long time either, about sixty years, and it would be nice to revisit...

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    4. Agreed! We can read it and compare how we like it now to when we first read it!

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  6. I love Italian banditti! They remind me of The Mysteries of Udolpho. These stories sound like fun! I will make note of them for another time.

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    1. they WERE fun, altho there were also some fairly grim parts in the Banditti one... but nothing like what pervades modern books!

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  7. Quite a diverse group of stories. I haven't read any of them but I did read Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow aloud to my daughter about 6 years ago. I wasn't expecting to like them but we both enjoyed them. Do you think the books you mentioned would be ok for a 16 yr old? she's been reading Haggard recently & likes books with a bit of adventure in them. Doesn't like sad stuff although she said that Haggard's Montezuma was but still liked the story - lots of history.

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    1. i went thru a Haggard stage in my teens also and was swept away by his imagination and writing... i really think she'd like Irving: he's one of the most civilized and interesting authors i've read and there's nothing in his plots that is any more shocking than one might discover in Haggard...

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  8. You find the most interesting things to read! :)

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    1. well, tx... some are just weird, i know... but it's true i'm interested in the sidelights of lit...

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